


If Music be the Food of Love

by DeerstalkerDeathFrisbee



Series: If Music Be... [1]
Category: Batman (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Musicians, Bat Family, F/M, Families of Choice, Fluff, Found Family, Friendship, Gen, Musicians, We Put the 'function' in dysfunction, but it's all good, fluff and nonsense, the media - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-24
Updated: 2016-02-24
Packaged: 2018-05-23 01:20:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6100153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DeerstalkerDeathFrisbee/pseuds/DeerstalkerDeathFrisbee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which seven people find music, friendship, family...and utter chaos.  Or something like that.  </p>
<p>A series of AU drabbles in which the Batfamily are a little less into dishing out justice and a little more into making music.</p>
            </blockquote>





	If Music be the Food of Love

**I. Dick Grayson**

Dick grew up in music, the hum of the circus; the blare of the sound system, the fizz and crackle of old speakers that have traveled many miles and will travel many more. He could hear it all around him, even when everyone said there was nothing to listen to. It was in the creak of leather harnesses, the shift of restless people and animals, in the pat-pat of hands and feet in chalk before taking to the sky. For Dick music was and always will be alive, a breathing thing that winds around him and fills him up from the inside out.

When he came to Wayne Manor the first thing he noticed was it’s size and the second thing he noticed was the silence. It hung in the halls, thick and heavy like dust that’s been gathering for ages and ages. Those first weeks he crept around, wary of that silence but afraid to disturb it, as if breaking it, bringing back the music of life would somehow betray those who lived no longer.

He found Bruce’s mother’s old grand piano by accident. Poking around in the ballroom, largely disused, full of dust both real and metaphorical, it was a big silent hole of a room in Dick’s subconscious.

Then he found the piano.

And when his fingers met the keys they found the old scales they’d memorized what felt like long ago and far away.

(He was never sure where he’d first picked up the little bit of piano he did know, just that it had been somewhere temporary, like all the places before the Manor were, and that it smelled like lavender and dryer sheets and cookies, like a grandmother’s house perhaps. Long ago and far away.)

Dick moved on from the piano eventually, never sticking with an instrument long enough to get good in the classical sense but always long enough that he could play his favorite songs by ear. (Dick played everything by ear, he didn’t have the patience for sheet music and it didn’t have much patience for him.)

He started writing songs at fifteen and by the time he was twenty everyone knew his name and face and girls mobbed his concerts and begged him to sign parts of their bodies he didn’t particularly want to see. (He stuck to signing CDs instead; those wouldn’t sue you.)

      And the music breathed around him, rattling, humming, buzzing through the world like a magnificent, electric pulse.

**II. Barbara Gordon**

They said she wouldn’t walk again. They said her music career was over. A wheelchair-bound lead singer had no sex appeal. Never mind that a teen girl band shouldn’t _need_ sex appeal. Never mind that music was _auditory_ not _visual_ and fuck their expectations and fuck what they said about her fucking _sex appeal._

      Barbara was very angry for a long time after the shooting.

And so she lay in her hospital bed and watched as the obsessive fan that shot her got his fifteen minutes of fame on the national news as his trial dragged on. She watched as her dad got his first grey hairs at her bedside. She watched as Dinah cried and asked if she wanted the band to just split up.

      She watched as she said no. “No, Dinah, no. The Birds of Prey are more than _me_. It’s about the music. It’s about the fans. Go inspire some kids, D. You’ll be a magnificent lead singer.”           

“Fuck, Babs, no one says ‘magnificent’ unironically.”

“I’m a special snowflake I guess.”

“You’re something special, kid.”

“Six months.”

“Hey, six months more than you. I’ll always be the older sister.”

“We’re not sisters,” Babs protested but there was no bite to the words. They were old and well-worn like the stairs in the house Babara grew up in.

A silence and then Dinah heaved a sigh, leaned over to hug her tight and whisper in her ear, “Once a Bird, always a Bird.”

“Hell yeah,” Barbara said, but it sounded hollow.

She went home and it didn’t feel the same. Nothing did. It all felt so…empty. The music was gone.

A phone call.

“How did you get this number?”

“Hello to you too.”

“ _Who the hell are you and how did you get this number_?”

“Um, Dick Grayson? We’re kind of friends?”

He was right. They were only ‘kind of’ friends. They were the sort of mutually famous people who loitered in back corners together during really unbearable parties and made each other laugh with terrible music puns. They’d climbed up to the roof together once. Dick bragged about being able to make the jump from one roof to the next while doing a mid-air flip. She’d tried to call his bluff and he’d done it just to prove her wrong. She’d followed him, executing her own flip with such precision it was almost geometric and landed beside him to find him staring at her as if she were magic.

“Hi Dick. What do you want? I’m not very good company right now. My doctor says I’m still in the ‘stages of grief’ part of the paralysis thing,” she said dryly.

“Oh, okay. I can call back when you’re over that then.”

“What?”

“Well, I figure once you’re done grieving you’ll be ready to say ‘fuck ‘em’ an prove all your doubters wrong about your career.”

“I’m done being a Bird of Prey,” she said flatly, pretending it didn’t hurt. She wasn’t doing very well.

“Yeah, but you’re still Babs Gordon. And you’re still a pretty badass musician,” a pause and then, “It’s fine. You’re hurting; I got it. I’ll call back when you’re ready to say ‘screw ‘em’.”

He hung up. She thought about that conversation far longer than she thought she would.

A few months later, another conversation.

“Hello!”

“You greet everyone like that, Grayson? I could be some sort of psycho. Or a telemarketer.”

“No reason not to be friendly.”

“There’s something wrong with you if you’re friendly to telemarketers.”

“Hi Babs.”

“Hi Dick. I’m going solo. Screw ‘em. And you didn’t call me. I called _you_.” And she hung up on Dick’s laugh with a smile on her face.

**III. Jason Todd**

Jason thought he might like this weird-ass manor place. Admittedly, it was populated with weirdos but they seemed like the begin sort of weird so he just let them be. It was a living place, the mansion. Not a dead place like the condemmed building he’d been squatting in before he tried to steal Mr. Wayne’s tires and somehow ended up here, with a new father, older brother and butler-grandfather-what-the-fuck-ever. Not a dying place like Crime Alley. And alive place. Nuturing. At age eleven Jason wasn’t sure if he wanted to be nurtured.

The weirdos seemed determined to nurture him regardless.

Dick was four years older than Jason and obsessed with music. He’d have a new instrument every week. Jason was pretty sure he’d started googling weird musical instrument shit just to find it, rent it, and play it. Dick said he could hear it, the music, all around him, that he could feel it in the air or something. Whatever. It was weird. Dick was weird. He gave good hugs though. For a weirdo. Jason wondered if he was really that good-natured and affectionate or just knew where to buy the good weed.  

Jason couldn’t feel or hear of _spidey-sense_ music the way Dick did. But he could feel something bubbling up inside him. An energy, a frenetic, restless, burning sort of thing. Something in his chest begging to be set free. He’d run, run around the grounds, try to outrun whatever restless thing was lurking inside him. And it’d work, for a time. But he’d always circle back around to that feeling, like a star was going supernova in his chest.

When he was twelve he found a guitar Dick didn’t use much. He snatched it, trusting his brother (yes, Dick was his brother now) not to notice its disappearance right away. After a few false starts (all as secret as he could make then, of course, there’s nothing worse than trying a new skill with an audience) and a great deal of internet information, he managed to coax a few chords out of the guitar.

He didn’t stop playing after those first, perfect chords.

**IV. Cassandra Cain**

Cass played drums with ferocious precision, like a snake striking at a mouse in the grass, poised, perfect, every strike perfectly targeted. She liked drums. They seemed simple but there were some many things below the surface, so many echoes and reverberations twisting and bouncing on and on and on.

Cass felt a unique sort of kinship with drums.

Dick and Jason were her brothers now, adopted but more because she chose them and they chose her, and they were loud and always dashing about along the course of their personal melodies, Dick chasing something outside himself, Jason chasing something inside. She used to hover at the edge of their jam sessions and practices and things, tapping rhythms into the wall, the doorframe, her leg, until Dick spotted her lurking (not an easy thing to do, spotting her) and presented her with a small drum and said “You’re keeping time, try to adapt to any changes you hear.”

Like Jason, Cass held onto her music and wouldn’t let go for anything.

**V. Stephanie Brown**

It was all Steph’s fault that they had a band in the first place. She was a year younger than Jason and Cass and attended their high school on scholarship and became their friend largely by sheer force of will. No one knew where she came from or how she did it but one day it was just the three of them and Bruce and Alfred and the next there was Stephanie Brown, squabbling with Jason on the sofa, reviewing vocab words with Cass at the kitchen table, and competing with the two of them to see who could get the most pieces of popcorn down Dick’s shirt before he noticed.

No one seemed inclined to chase her out so she just stayed, growing on them like a fungus. Emphasis on the ‘fun’.

      She was the one who started the whole band thing. Dick was on a summer tour and the other kids were sulking (Jason could deny it all he wanted but that was what it was) at home, slowly melting under Gotham’s muggy, oppressive heat, expensive air conditioning or not. Jason was lying on the kitchen floor, shirtless, trying to absorb the tile’s chill. His guitar lay on his stomach and his calloused fingers picked out a desultory half-melody. Cass slumped at the breakfast bar in artistically tattered black shorts and an aggressively yellow tank top, tapping out a rhythm on her water glass. Stephanie had her feet up on the breakfast bar, turned away from Cass, and half-heartedly tried to paint her nails at an odd angle. Halfway through her left foot she started humming along to the other two’s almost-song. By the time she’d worked her way past her right big toe she was harmonizing with Jason’s guitar and stringing together words into silly rhythmic rhymes until Cass stopped and the other two stilled and looked at her, Jason twisting his neck up and around to stare.

“Wait.” Every word Cass spoke was careful, deliberate. Like she framed every sentence in her head before she let it loose on the world. “Why aren’t we writing this down?”

Steph grinned, “Up and at ‘em, Jaybird.”

Jason glared balefully up at her. “What?”

“Get off the floor, we’re writing our song and then we’re forming a band, possibly getting YouTube famous, _definitely_ getting t-shirts, most likely having a massive fight over the band name, probably getting stupid-famous or maybe just stupid.”

He narrowed his eyes suspiciously at her.

“Get off your butt, Jason, we’re making a band!”

“No.”

“Yes,” the girls said in sync.

“Now go get us some paper and pens.” Stephanie grinned at him and could have sworn he actually _blanched_ at the possibly-manic gleam in her eye.

He got off the floor and got some paper and pens.

When Dick got home a few weeks later it was to be tackle-hugged by Jason yelling “I’ve got a band of beautiful chicks and you don’t, suck it, Grayson!”

“Women, they like to be called women. Don’t be an asshole little wing.”

“Whatever, man, I’m surrounded by beautiful, talented women and you’re all alone, you sad bastard.”

“Did I mention I’m dating Babs Gordon and she’s coming home with me for a week at the end of my tour?”

“WHAT THE HELL, GRAYSON? HOW DO YOU HAVE ALL THE LUCK?!”

**VI. Timothy Drake**

Tim did not want to join a band. Possibly ever. Being a rock star of any kind was not in his life plan. There was really no appeal to it, he told himself. None at all.

Then he met the Wayne children and everything spiraled out of control from there.

He wanted out of the house for a day. It was oppressive, that place. Heavy and dark, totally empty, actually. Apparently fifteen was old enough to be left alone in the house when his parents took off for parts unknown to do god knows what and come home months later tanned and even richer and even less interested in what they’d left behind.

He considered running away sometimes. Then he remembered that _literally no one would know for possibly months_ and knowing for a definite fact that his parents wouldn’t do _anything_ for _months_ if he disappeared was not something he thought he could handle.

But feeling the house, dead and empty around him, crushing him, making him smaller with its bulk, made him want to scream. On good days he’d flee to the music room some long ago relative had installed on the third floor and focus on filling it up with sound, letting everything inside flow out through his fingers, into the piano, leaving him feeling scraped clean from the inside out, full of open spaces and the potential for something better, healthier, maybe.

On bad days, well.

He’d still go up to the music room, but he wouldn’t play anything. He’d just sit at the piano. Or pace. Once he punched a wall. He regretted that almost instantly. Then he spent thirty minutes frantically searching WebMD for how to diagnose a broken knuckle just in case he’d mutilated his hand in his rage. He hadn’t. That was good, he supposed.

Some days he’d walk. Just take his camera and walk, photographing Gotham from all angles, capturing its gritty, grimy glory. He found out the hard way that one was not supposed to climb buildings to get a better angle. Apparently that made businesses nervous about insurance premiums. Apparently that nervousness translated to calling the police claiming he was causing a ‘public disturbance’.

So one October afternoon, when he couldn’t concentrate on the piano and had run out of books to read, he grabbed his camera and wandered the neighborhood, snapping photos of leaves and trees and the strange garden decorations rich people thought up and wasted money procuring.

When someone started shouting “Hey you!” Tim just assumed they were talking to someone else. People were always talking to someone else. But then a boy he recognized from school - tall, dark hair, pale blue eyes and a funny white streak in his hair (is that natural?) – Jason Todd-Wayne, 16, almost 17, he was one of the neighbors, wasn’t he, ran up to him and grabbed him by the jacket collar and wrenched him, jacket and all, around to face him.

Tim did not appreciate the manhandling. “What, asshole?” he snapped, taking a swing at Jason’s stomach that somehow connected and made the taller boy cough in surprise.

He didn’t let go of Tim’s jacket, though. Jerk.

**“** You're a rich kid, right?”

“If you’re trying to get a ransom you’re out of luck.” Tim said flatly.

“Hey, shut up slugger. You’re a rich kid, right? You had fancy lessons in pretty much everything ever, right?”

“You’ve got to stop saying ‘right’ at the end of every sentence. Also, let go of my jacket or I’m punching you again.”

Jason snorted but let him go, “You know how to play piano?”

“Um.” (What the hell was going on?!) “Yeah.” Yes. Tim was feeling particularly eloquent today.

“Awesome, come on, we need a keyboardist and Dick’s off on tour. Again. Bastard.”

And that was how Tim joined a band and met his three best friends. (Stephanie, Cass and Alfred, obviously. Jason was still that-asshole-who-kidnapped-me. He was Tim’s favorite asshole. And possibly a strong contender for the title of favorite person. But still. Asshole. Kidnapping asshole.).

**VII. Damian Wayne**

Damian was going to join his siblings’ band, even if it killed him. Or them. He was comfortable fighting for his position in the group mafia-style.

He joined the family when he was nine and they were teenagers rocking out in the garage. Admittedly, Bruce Wayne’s garage had much better acoustics than your average suburban home’s but Stephanie said it was the thought that counted. If they were going to be a garage band, they needed a garage. Simple.

Damian didn’t see the logic but was willing to at least superficially accept it if it meant gaining entrance into their little consortium.

“You keep Brown and Drake around and they’re not even family,” Damian protested to Jason.

“Yeah, well, canning both our singers seemed kind of dumb, so we let them stick around. Plus Tim plays keyboard.”

“Tch. I bet I could teach myself how to keyboard.”

“Not like Tim can.”

“It’s not fair.” Damian did not whine. He growled. And glowered. And because he was basically a tiny hell-demon in a human body, it was actually a little scary, in a weird, cute way.

That did not mean he got to join the band.

Then Dick, ever the peacemaker, decided to take Damian with him the next time he traveled for a concert. No one really knew what happened on that trip, but the day they got back, Damian marched right past the group gathered in the garage saying imperiously, “Step aside, peasants, I’m part of Grayson’s band now.”

Behind him Dick just sort of shrugged while Babs laughed internally without moving her face. Which, really, was kind of impressive.


End file.
